


look what you've done

by manusinistra



Category: LOONA (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/F, lipves are ras, maknae line are the residents, this is mostly an excuse for me to write dorm shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 08:05:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19247158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manusinistra/pseuds/manusinistra
Summary: Being an RA seems like a good deal. Free room and board, a giant single, and all Lip has to do is make sure a few dozen underclassmen make it through the year alive.She didn’t count on getting maniacs for residents, though. Or on the other RA being annoyingly pretty.





	look what you've done

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted a break from the angst in my ongoing fic, so this is short, light, and pretty fluffy. And I'd been meaning to write lipves - consider this my contribution to a noble, underserved nation. Hope you enjoy, and as always I'd love to hear thoughts.

Being an RA seems like a good deal. Free room and board, a giant single, and all Lip has to do is make sure a few dozen underclassmen make it through the year alive. Her own freshman dorm wasn’t that chaotic, so she figures it’ll be a breeze.

That optimism lasts two days into orientation week.

“Heejin, no!” Lip shouts, as one of her charges careens drunkenly down the dorm hallway, making a beeline for the stairwell. Lip grabs for her shirt as she runs by, but she executes a twirling hop-step and the fabric slides through Lip's hands. 

Lip takes off after her, but Heejin has momentum on her side.

“Someone stop her before she hits the stairs!”

Lip has terrible, technicolor visions of Heejin tumbling down them, cracking her head open on the railing. Howling in pain as blood splatters against the unfortunate yellow-green paint facilities insists on using for their walls. 

Lip’s career as an RA, over in less than a week. 

Except, the dorm has two RAs. 

Yves appears out of nowhere, taking up a goalie stance in front of the stairs.

“Stop,” she calls out, and when Heejin just keeps barreling forward Yves braces herself against the doorframe. Her long arms let her hold on to both sides, and Lip watches as she tests her grip, preparing for the worst. 

Time slows for the collision.

Heejin slams into Yves. Yves staggers back. Her grip holds, miraculously, and they come to a halt a foot shy of the first stair. 

By the time Lip gets there, out of breath from her sprint, Yves has Heejin wrapped in something that’s half hug, half containment strategy. 

“Mmm, warm,” Heejin mumbles, snuggling into Yves’ neck. 

“What is she on,” Yves says.

“Half a beer, according to her roommate. Apparently she’s just a lightweight who loves to run.”

Yves groans.

“This is going to be a long year.”

All the yelling has drawn people out of their rooms, and Yves scans the assembled crowd, eyes landing on the roommate in question. Her name is Hyunjin, but she hasn’t done anything stupid yet so that’s all Lip remembers about her.

“You!” Yves unwraps Heejin, sends her in Hyunjin’s direction. Heejin is an equal opportunity octopus, it turns out, because she winds herself around Hyunjin just as happily. “When Heejin’s drunk, you keep her away from stairs. This is your sacred roommate duty. Got it?”

Hyunjin’s eyes go wide, but she nods. Everyone disperses, leaving Lip and Yves alone in the hallway.

“Can we do that?” Lip says.

Yves shrugs. 

“Probably not, but the freshmen don’t know that yet.”

;;

When classes start, high speed chases give way to more expected troubles: incompatible roommates, dirty kitchens, minor property damage. 

Lip learns all the kids’ names and stories, and learns as well who to expect trouble from. There’s a cluster of three rooms that seems to breed it, and every time Lip goes by them she shivers, like the sheer quantity of impending mischief turns that section of the hall ten degrees colder. 

First up: room 221, Heejin and Hyunjin. Lip hoped Hyunjin would be a calming influence, but instead Heejin recruits her into weirdness. 

Case in point: after getting a ‘we need help!’ text, Lip opens their door to find them both sitting upside down on the futon, feet in the air and hair falling to the floor. They stare up at her in eerie unison.

“You said you needed help?”

“Yeah,” Heejin says. “Can you hand me the chips on the bed?”

“Why can’t you get them?” 

“I’d have to turn right side up, and I can’t because we both live in upside down world now.”

Lip doesn’t want to reward this, but she knows that if she leaves they’ll just text her again and again. So she gets the bag of chips, crunches it between her hands until there’s nothing left but tiny chip crumbs. 

“The chips didn’t deserve that,” Hyunjin says mournfully. Still upside down. 

Room 222 – Choerry and Yeojin – specializes in losing things. Half-eaten food, homework assignments, but most of all keys. 

The pair lock themselves out so many times that Lip gives up keeping count. Yves makes a stack of unauthorized spares for them, but Yeojin takes the keys around the dorm to show off and somehow manages to lose every one.

And, finally, room 223: Gowon and Olivia. The most dangerous of all. 

They secure that title by blowing out the electricity in the whole dorm. This should be impossible, according to the RA handbook Lip and Yves read by flashlight, because it’s a new dorm and everything is surge protected to within an inch of its life. 

However, modern engineering is no match for the glowing mess of monitors that is Olivia’s side of the room. Especially in conjunction with all the devices Gowon uses to do her hair.

When Lip asks them to take it easy on their outlets, Olivia frowns hard.

“I need all my stuff.”

One of her screens is running code; another has some sort of game loaded. Lip can only guess what the others are for, especially since one is just displaying static.

Lip turns to Gowon.

“Maybe blow dry in the bathroom next time, ok?” 

;;

Yves is confusing to work with. 

She’s polite and accommodating when they assign shifts, and creative in the way she approaches problems. Lip doesn’t know what to make of her, though, because sometimes she gets so into whatever the freshmen are doing that she turns into one of them.

Like when Olivia and Gowon host a game night (everyone is invited, as apology for that whole short circuiting the dorm thing).

By the end it devolves into a rowdy Mario Kart tournament, and when Lip comes by to tell them to keep it down Yves is the one making the most noise. She just lost to Yeojin, apparently, and she’s yelling about how elbowing her in the last lap is cheating. 

“I can’t hear you,” Yeojin says. “I don’t speak loser.”

“It was only close because we’re too sober. I’d destroy all of you in drunk Mario Kart.”

Here Lip has to cut in.

“Yves, they’re 18. What are you doing.”

Yves shrugs.

“It’s not like they can’t get alcohol elsewhere. If they’re going to drink, it’s safer for them to do it here.”

That almost makes sense, except:

“We’re the RAs, remember? We’re supposed to report all instances of underage drinking.”

“Oh, right.” Yves turns to face the room. “If you drink here don’t let us catch you.”

;;

The bigger problem for Lip is the sleep schedule. 

She’s always been early to bed, early to rise. She loves the quiet of early mornings: it’s the only time there’s peace in the dorm, when everyone else is asleep (or frantically-but-silently working at the end of an all-nighter).

More than that, she just can’t stay up late. She’s yawning by 10, and if she tries to work past 11 her problem sets turn into an indecipherable alien language.

“You’re worse than Cinderella,” Yves jokes when she catches Lip nodding off over linear algebra. “She at least made it to midnight.”

Dorm emergencies don’t keep to regular work hours, though, and the freshmen love coming to Lip in particular when light-night adventures go awry. One week she gets woken up at 2AM on successive nights, to deal with crises as urgent as “someone ate my cookie dough ice cream and I need it to finish this project and since it’s not here I have to drop out of school and become a wandering vagabond now.”

When it happens again – this time involving all the dorm troublemakers and a disastrous attempt at cookies – Lip reaches a breaking point. 

“Why do you guys always come to me so late at night?”

“Aren’t you a night owl?” Choerry says, completely in earnest. “Yves told us you work late anyway, so we wouldn’t be waking you up.” 

“Did she. How considerate of her.”

This is a declaration of war, especially since Yves tends to be up at this time of night. She’s even mentioned signing up for all night classes this term, because of her passionate hatred of having to move before noon. 

Which gives Lip an idea. 

“You know what, speaking of Yves. She’s trying to change her sleep schedule, so you guys should help her out by waking her up early.”

“Really?” Olivia says, suspicious but intrigued. 

“Yep. The earlier, the better. Like, the next time you feel a bad decision coming on, see if you can time it to sunrise.”

“Ok!” they all chorus, eyes lit up with plans in the making. 

A week later, Lip comes back from her morning swim to see Yves giving one of her ‘you should know better’ speeches. It’s less convincing than usual because she’s in fuzzy pink pajamas, rubbing sleep from her eyes while her hair sticks up at the back. 

Lip would deny it if you asked, but Yves is cute in all her disheveled glory. 

She looks over at Lip, and there's a flash of realization at the smirk Lip is wearing. She shakes her head, mouth curling in a slow smile. 

Lip waits for her to finish with the freshmen.

“Well played,” Yves says. “Truce?”

“Truce.”

They shake on it.

;;

After that, Lip figures she and Yves will be RA work friends – close enough in the dorm, irrelevant to each other’s lives outside of it.

Only, that’s not quite how it happens.

“Hey, Lip! Over here!”

Lip is in the business school cafeteria – business students are terrible but they get the best food – planning to sit alone and reread some chapters for an upcoming test. The last thing she expects is to run into someone she knows.

But there Yves is waving at her, sitting with two girls that look vaguely familiar. Lip walks over, sits down when they make space for her.

“This is Lip,” Yves tells her friends. “We share a hallway.”

“Just say she's an RA, too. Why do you have to make everything sound weird,” the blonde one says.

“She likes to pretend she’s charming,” says the brunette. “I’m Haseul, by the way. And that’s Jinsoul. Since Yves doesn’t have the manners to introduce us herself.”

“Hey, I’m so charming,” Yves protests. “Lip, tell them.”

“Um. Sure?”

Yves pouts; her friends crack up.

“Wow. You really are losing your touch, Yves.”

“Are you all-” Lip pauses, realizing she doesn’t know Yves’ major. “-studying the same thing?”

Haseul answers for all of them.

“I’m comm, like Yves. Jinsoul abandoned us for the sciences.”

“What can I say, the fish were calling me.”

Jinsoul raises her hands in a ‘so be it’ gesture. This sounds like a well-worn discussion, especially when Yves and Haseul start ganging up on Jinsoul for her love of all things aquatic. Just as Lip is about to tune out, Yves puts a halt to the conversation.

“Sorry, Lip. We get a little carried away. Anyway, what are you working on?”

She points to the overstuffed notebook sticking out of Lip’s bag.

“Just studying for a test in my controls class.”

Yves rests her chin in her hand, looking intently at Lip. Lip feels warm under the weight of her gaze. 

“I have no idea what that means. Want to tell me? Sometimes that helps me study.”

Lip rambles about the class for a while, stumbling over how to translate technical terms into words that make sense. She spends most of her time in the engineering quad, and most of her people are STEM, too. It’s weird to be talking to someone from another discipline about class stuff, and she’s not doing a great job at it. 

Yves doesn’t seem to mind. Just pays careful attention, prodding Lip with a question whenever she runs out of things to day. It’s intense, the way that Yves listens, and by the end of lunch Lip feels like she’s the one who’s been studied. 

;;

At a dorm movie night, Lip has a hard time keeping her eyes open. 

“Are you gonna make it?” Yves whispers from beside her. “There’s an hour left, and it’s already past your bedtime.”

Lip glares at her, though it’s too dark to do much good.

“Thanks for your concern. I’ll be fine.”

“Well, in case you want to sleep.”

Yves pats her shoulder in invitation. Lip refuses at first, but after a few minutes her eyelids get heavy again and Yves is right there, so as her head tips to the side she doesn’t fight it.

When she wakes up she expects to be graffiti-ed, definitely by the freshmen and maybe by Yves. Her face is free of marks, though, and when she runs into a herd of residents the next day she asks why they didn’t take the opportunity to write all over her. 

“We wanted to, believe me,” Yeojin says. “Yves wouldn’t let us.”

“Really?”

Something warm blooms in Lip at the thought of Yves protecting her. Then she shakes it off, because that’s a weird reaction and she wants nothing to do with it. 

;;

“Who do you think will be the hall’s first couple?” Yves asks one day, as the two of them are trying to find a cleaner that will remove purple dye from the shower. 

(It’s everywhere, on the floors and the shower curtains and somehow even the ceiling. Choerry has newly purple hair so it’s clear who caused this, but she’s so happily committed to pretending she didn’t that neither of them have the heart to do anything. Besides, she clearly had help, and they don’t know who else to punish.) 

“No one? Most of them are straight, probably.”

“Have some imagination. It’s college, everyone’s at least a little gay.”

_Does that include you_ , says a voice in Lip’s head, because Yves is annoying but she’s also hot. 

Lip may have noticed. Begrudgingly. 

“I haven’t seen any of them at the queer center mixers,” is what Lip actually says.

Yves scoffs.

“That’s because only desperate nerds go to those. I haven’t been since my first semester.”

“So I’m a desperate nerd, huh.”

To Lip’s surprise (and glee), Yves gets flustered.

“Uh. Maybe not.” Yves recovers her composure, looks Lip up and down. “You’re too pretty for that.”

“Chill, Casanova,” Lip says, but her ears are pink when she gets back to her room. 

;;

Yves and Lip end up at a party together. 

It’s a boring one: Lip goes because Chuu makes giant eyes and says “come on we haven’t hung out in forever.” Once they get there, Chuu proceeds to go off on her own to do whatever it is she gets up to at parties. Lip can never really tell, beyond it meaning that she gets left behind.

She runs into Yves by the drinks table.

Lip doesn’t really need another drink, but she danced for a while and avoided frat boys for a while, so this seems like the natural next step.

Yves smiles to see her.

“What are you drinking?” 

Lip doesn’t answer, because Yves’ dress is short and backless and she can see a lot of Yves right now. It has an effect. 

“Hey, are you ok?”

Lip blames the drinks she’s already had for replying:

“Wanna make out?” 

Yves narrows her eyes.

“Is that a joke? Because if it is, it’s not funny.”

“No jokes.”

Lip is looking at Yves’ mouth now. Her lipgloss is sparkly, and it glimmers in time to the obnoxious strobe light hanging from the ceiling. 

“Yeah, ok. Come here.”

“Or you could come here,” Lip says, and it’s ridiculous because they’re two steps apart, but at the same time she’s the one who asked Yves to kiss her and she’s committed to not ceding any more ground.

Yves takes one step. She’s very close now. 

“Your turn.”

Lip takes her time, and just when she thinks she’s made Yves wait long enough Yves gets impatient and tugs her forward. Their mouths come together too fast, and there’s some banging of teeth before they settle into each other. 

Once they do, it’s electric. Everything Yves does feels amazing, which is weird because Lip doesn’t usually like kissing people while drunk: it’s sloppy and out of control, too warm and not in the sexy way. But Yves’ body presses against hers and Lip can’t get enough of it, which means it has to be less about the fact of a body and more that this body belongs to Yves.

That’s not a thing Lip wants to admit, so she focuses on the way Yves’ hands slide across her back. She wishes she were wearing something backless too, so that she could feel it directly against her skin. 

They kiss until someone bumps into Lip, spilling a drink over them both.

“I’m kind of done with this party,” Yves says, shaking sticky liquid off her arm. “Want to go home?”

As they walk across campus, the cold air sobers Lip up. So does the fact that they're not touching anywhere. The heady buzz fades from her body and she’s left with uncertainty, which makes it hard to look at Yves when they get to the place in the hallway where their paths diverge. 

“Do you want –”

Yves cuts herself off.

“Want what?” 

Yves looks at Lip like she’s waiting for a signal. Sighs like she doesn’t get it.

“You know what, I’ll see you tomorrow. Sleep well.” 

;;

They don’t ignore each other after that, but they do ignore that something happened.

Or they try, because Lip is so, so aware that it happened. It can’t help but color all their interactions, like an unspoken clause in every exchange: yes I’ll be on call Friday, and oh remember when we made out, what do you think of that?

No one makes it explicit, and the waiting goes on and on. Lip keeps hoping Yves will make the first move, because she likes the safety of reaction: if the other person goes first, she never really has to put herself out there. She knows where they’re at before she has to reveal anything too compromising. 

Yves thwarts that plan, remaining frustratingly inscrutable.

Until the day Hyunjin gets sick. Heejin collects both of them, drags them to her room.

“Something’s really wrong. She can barely stand, and she fell on the way to the bathroom.”

“I’m fine,” Hyunjin says. “I just need to sleep it off.”

Yves takes her temperature. It’s 102, high enough that when she starts throwing up it’s time for a trip to the emergency room. Heejin demands to come with them, but Hyunjin protests:

“You have an exam tomorrow, and it’s already midnight.” 

“But I want to be there with you.”

“I won’t go at all if it keeps you from getting sleep.” 

They glare at each other, stuck in a deadlock. 

“How about if both Lip and I go,” Yves says. “And I text you updates every hour.”

“Every 30 minutes.”

“Deal.”

At the hospital, Hyunjin gets seen quickly. However, it’s a long time before she comes back, which leaves Lip and Yves sitting together stewing in awkwardness. 

Eventually Yves puts her hand on the chair between them. Maybe thoughtlessly, maybe with intention. Lip puts hers next to it, far enough away that there can be no accidental touching. She needs to know if there’s purpose to what Yves is doing, and that’s what makes her heart jump at the brush of fingers against hers: Yves had to choose to do that, couldn’t have just let it happen. 

To be clear, the ER holding area is the least romantic setting possible. Someone’s hacking up a lung, someone else keeps going to the bathroom to vomit, and the air is so dry Lip can feel her skin desiccating.

None of that matters when Yves holds her hand, tracing random patterns over her palm. 

Fuck situational appropriateness. Lip is higher than the heroine at the end of a romance novel.

She’s so excited that it’s hard to listen when a nurse comes out to tell them Hyunjin will be fine. (She was just insanely dehydrated, because she tried to work and train through having the flu, but they’ll give her fluids and she can go in the morning.) 

Back at the dorm, Lip and Yves reach the same point of divergence in the hallway. This time, Lip is brave enough to kiss Yves first.

“Come to my room?” she says when they break apart.

Yves' smile is blinding, and she holds Lip's hand the whole way.

The next day, the residents surprise them with a cake.

This is what it says, in sloppy icing letters:

“Congrats on finally getting together, you idiots. Love, your freshmen.”

**Author's Note:**

> twt: [@leaderline97](https://twitter.com/leaderline97)  
> cc: [@leaderline97](https://curiouscat.me/leaderline97)


End file.
